Post-Holocaust

Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History

Berel Lang

Publication Year: 2005

"These essays are extremely well written, with the clarity and
accessibility that one has come to expect from Berel Lang, one of the most respected
and significant philosophers writing about the Holocaust and its impact." --
Michael L. Morgan

In these trenchant essays, philosopher Berel
Lang examines post-Holocaust intepretations -- and misinterpretations -- showing the
ways in which rhetoric and ideology have affected historical discourse about the
Holocaust and how these accounts can be deconstructed. Why didn't the Jews resist?
How could the Germans have done what they did? Why didn't more bystanders join in
the rescue? In Lang's view, these questions become mischievous when the
circumstances in which victims, perpetrators, and bystanders played their roles are
omitted or obscured. To confront such issues adequately requires comparative and
contextual evidence. Post-Holocaust addresses such questions as the place of the
Holocaust in the Nazi project as a whole, the roles of revenge and forgiveness in
post-Holocaust Jewish thinking, Holocaust commemoration as artifice or
"business," and the relationship of the Holocaust to traditional
antisemitism. Lang's analysis provides an incisive and fruitful basis for
confronting these critical subjects.

Cover

Title page, copyright page

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction

On the one hand, to speak about interpretations of the Holocaust may seem a
provocation or offensive. Surely, for that event if for any, the facts speak for
themselves in the enormity of systematic genocide, leaving nothing over to
interpret, nothing to ponder or contest. What could be more explicit, plainer...

Part One In the Matter of Justice

1 The Nazi as Criminal
Inside and Outside the Holocaust

Before discussing what I refer to as Nazi criminality, I feel obliged to raise
certain objections to what I have to say about that subject. This means of proceeding
may seem out of order, and certainly it makes for an unusual preface....

2 Forgiveness, Revenge,
and the Limits of Holocaust Justice

So much has been said and written about the Holocaust in the more than halfcentury
of the Post-Holocaust that it seems odd to call attention to issues that
have gone relatively unnoticed—but certain of these are indeed the subject of
this chapter. My reason for doing this is the importance, for anyone who looks...

3 Evil, Suffering, and the Holocaust

The need to account for the appearance of evil in a world assumed to be ruled
by goodness and justice provoked Jewish religious and philosophical reflection
long before the Holocaust. The “problem” of evil, pointed most sharply in the
phenomenon of human suffering and loss, figured in the very origins of Jewish...

4 Comparative Evil
Measuring Numbers, Degrees, People

It is a truth universally acknowledged that some wrongful acts are more wrongful
than others. Why is this? That is, why the universal acknowledgment, and
(before that) why the “truth” itself ? These are the first questions addressed...

Part Two: Language and Lessons

5 The Grammar of Antisemitism

The several tongue-twisting “the’s” in my title are less difficult to manage than
the problem they conceal. For there is a conceptual, cultural, and, finally, moral
issue that bears directly on antisemitism in the common linking of the definite
article the and Jews—that is, in the Jews. I do not mean to claim that antisemitism...

6 The Unspeakable vs. the Testimonial: Holocaust Trauma
in Holocaust History

Few more portentous terms could be fitted into the space of this chapter’s title,
and the only justification I venture for this is the interconnection among the
terms that do appear: History, Trauma, Testimony, and the inclusive issue of
Speakability—all of them converging and intertwined in the event of the Holocaust...

7 Undoing Certain Mischievous Questions about the Holocaust

Certain questions frequently asked about the Holocaust have been, are—quite
simply—mischievous. I mean by this that at the same time these questions ask
or inquire, they also mislead, distort, cause trouble—and this in a setting that
is already so very deeply troubled. The mischief caused in this way will not be...

8 From the Particular to the Universal, and Forward:
Representations and Lessons

When we hear the phrase “representations of the Holocaust,” we think first of
artistic representations: novels or films or paintings or even, as Art Spiegelman
has demonstrated, comic strips, all of them incorporating events or themes
linked to the occurrence of the Holocaust, now almost sixty years in the past....

Part Three: For and Against Interpretation

There is nothing startling by now in the claim of a role for style in writing
(or reading) history, but most working historians would probably still vote
against it, the more so if the claim included Hayden White’s conception of...

10 Lachrymose without Tears: Misreading the Holocaust in American Life

In 1988, Peter Novick published That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question”
and the American Historical Profession,1 in which he criticized the sometime
ideal among American historians of writing neutral or objective histori

11 “Not Enough” vs. “Plenty”: Which Did Pius XII?

That Susan Zuccotti and Ronald Rychlak—joining many others—¤nd themselves
quarreling about the actions or inactions of Pius XII during the Holocaust
does not necessarily mean that they disagree.1 More precisely, it does not
mean that they disagree on what they think they are disagreeing about—or...

12 The Evil in Genocide

A different title that I decided not to use for this chapter would have been
more explicit—but also offensive: “What’s so bad about genocide, anyway? ” That
wording sounds flippant, and the topic of genocide warrants something more
than that. But the flippancy has a serious side to it, since although what is bad

13 Misinterpretation as the Author’s Responsibility
(Nietzsche’s Fascism, for Instance)

The title of this chapter may seem perverse in imposing the two concepts of
misinterpretation and responsibility on an author who spent much of his life
and work battling against both of them. It seems to me necessary, however, to
consider these concepts in order to assess the charges that link—or more point...

Afterword Philosophy and/of the Holocaust

To inquire about the contributions of philosophy and philosophers to thinking
about the Holocaust or, more academically, to Holocaust Studies, is both to ask
and to leave a question. The fact is that those contributions have by any measurement...

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